Sure. We all need to learn much more, much faster, and much better;
not just to get ready for work, but to keep up with the electric
changes and explosion of information that permeate our increasingly
checkered careers. Moreover, learning is the work that two-thirds to
three- quarters of US workers now get paid to do, and is, in fact, the
central production process of the imminent knowledge-age economy.

But schooling has become an obstacle to the kind of learning the
modern workforce needs. Much of what the public widely believes about
the function and value of schooling is not only wrong, but often the
opposite of reality. Humans are genetically designed to be active
learners; passively absorbing knowledge from an "expert" teacher just
doesn't work. Research proves that the most effective human learning
actually takes place in the context of real-life experience, not in
classrooms. More than 99 percent of what the average American now
learns in a lifetime is not learned in any classroom.

As the growing unemployment of our most schooled workers demonstrates,
academic success is at best irrelevant and may even be harmful to
working productively in the real world. The exploding information base
and intelligent tools of the modern economy make thinking skills far
more important than the memorization of facts or rote exercises. And,
in contradiction to the one-dimensional notion of academic "aptitude"
that's valued in the bogus currency of measures such as IQ or SAT
scores, people have at least seven independent kinds of intelligence,
or talent, and a dozen or more distinct yet effective "styles" of
learning.

But schooling is still necessary for "socialization," right?

Nope. Research shows that many if not most of the actual socializing
effects of schools are harmful: The losing majority of students get
wounded self-esteem, while the "excellent" few percent of students get
a false sense of superiority and security.

Think about it. In what other domain of work or social life is a
premium placed on your ability to sit in rows of desks in a room, be
talked at for 40 or 50 minutes, and then, when a bell rings, to walk
down a hall to another room to repeat the same experience again and
again during the day?

The good news is that a new wave of technology I call "hyperlearning,"
or HL for short, offers a technological replacement for today's
educational morass.

HL is not a single device or process, but a universe of new
technologies that both possesses and enhances intelligence. The
"hyper" in hyperlearning refers not merely to the extraordinary speed
and scope of new information technology, but to an unprecedented
degree of connectedness of knowledge, experience, media, and brains -
both human and non-human. The "learning" in HL refers most literally
to the transformation of knowledge and behavior through experience.

Hyperlearning is weaving the fabric of a new economy out of four key
technological threads:

* First is the "smart" environment, where every artifact you touch or
are touched by - cars, houses, toilets, clothes, tools, toys, whatever
- is endowed with its own intelligence. The special significance of
this intelligence is that it increasingly includes the ability not
only to aid humans to learn, but to actively participate in the
process of learning itself.

* Second is what my colleague George Gilder calls the "telecosm" - the
growing broadband communications infrastructure that makes all
knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime. For both human and
non-human learning, the telecosm makes the "best and brightest"
available everywhere.

* The third thread is a kit of "hypermedia" software tools needed to
navigate through a knowledge-dense universe. In relation to
multimedia, hypermedia is an expanded, multi-dimensional version of a
book index. Hypermedia provides the technical bridge that leads the
user away from informing and toward understanding.

* The fourth and last thread in the matrix of HL technology is brain
technology, a broad category representing the application of biology
and other sciences to thinking and sensing systems. In a sense, brain
tech is the "wild card" in the HL deck. It contributes much of the
basic science and technical tools that underlie the other three areas
of hyperlearning technology. But it also offers a growing potential
for biotechnology that can alter the learning process from the
inside
out.